‘Good Chinese Wife’ Wrings Insight From a Bad Gig

“I thought I knew what I was getting into,” is what author Susan Blumberg-Kason told me about her marriage at the age of 24 to a Chinese doctoral student she met while living in Hong Kong. And she had every reason to feel confident: Competent in Mandarin and with multiple trips to China under her belt, she had about as good a grasp of the country as any Westerner could back in 1995, when few had the opportunity to travel widely there.

Over the next five years, however, she came to realize the vast difference between visiting China and trying to become part of a Chinese family.

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Relationships between Western women and Chinese men are still rare, though less uncommon than many might think. According to data analyzed by scholars Elaine Jeffreys and Wang Pan, 49,000 marriages involving foreigners and mainland Chinese were registered in 2010. In roughly one quarter of those marriages, the groom was Chinese.

Members of the “AMWF” (Asian Male/Western Female) community have also formed a tight-knit group online. Bloggers such as Jocelyn Eikenburg of Speaking of China and Tracy Slater, who writes at The Good Shufu, support each other and share their stories of negotiating cross-cultural relationships while living in Asia. Most of their tales are happy ones of learning to live together despite minor misunderstandings and humorous cultural gaffes.

As the book recounts, Blumberg-Kason and Cai met in the lobby of their dormitory — she had accidentally locked herself out of her room — and began spending time together as she tutored him in English pronunciation. She quickly found herself attracted to his confident manner and good looks. Divorced and in his early 30s, Cai seemed more worldly than most of the other mainland students studying at the university. Blumberg-Kason, who had never dated anyone for more than three weeks, was overjoyed when Cai finally asked her out—and stunned when he proposed marriage in the next breath.

Susan Blumberg-Kason, the author of Good Chinese Wife

Tom Kason

Afraid that Cai would change his mind if she hesitated, she accepted both the date and the marriage proposal.

There were red flags from the start: Cai wanted to move back to China after completing his PhD, while Blumberg-Kason hoped to stay in Hong Kong. And “he wanted me to be this soft, agreeable person,” she explained to me. Cai complained about modern Chinese women being “harsh, emotional and selfish” and about American women who were “loud.” In love, she chose to go ahead with the wedding.

Almost immediately, Blumberg-Kason began to see that Cai could be controlling and unhappy. In disagreements, he alternately yelled and gave her the silent treatment. He liked to spend his evenings (including their one-night honeymoon) watching porn, and went off for days at a time with “Japanese Father,” a mysterious older professor who had a hold over Cai that Blumberg-Kason didn’t understand.

Conflict-averse, she attributed their disputes to cultural differences and tried hard to bottle her emotions so she could be the agreeable wife that Cai wanted. To that end, she made long visits to Cai’s parents in their home village two hours outside of Wuhan, where she tried to acclimate to homes without heat and lonely days spent watching Cai play marathon card games with his friends.

A move to San Francisco in 1998 didn’t solve things, and neither did the birth of their son, Jake, later that year. Cai’s parents came to stay with the family, and arguing with her mother-in-law over proper child-rearing practices exhausted Blumberg-Kason, who was supporting the family of five on her administrative assistant’s salary.

When Cai threatened to send their son back to live with his parents in central China, Blumberg-Kason decided the time had come for her to leave.

Fifteen years later, Blumberg-Kason sees the relationship and its failures with much more clarity than she did as it was falling apart. She decided to write “Good Chinese Wife” when she realized that her experience was far from unusual but that few books existed to address them.

Looking back, she considers how Cai’s adolescent years might have shaped the husband he became. “He grew up during the Cultural Revolution,” she told me. “He left home at 14, and he never had parental figures after that, and I think maybe he was searching for someone to be in that role.”

Blumberg-Kason doesn’t view the speed of their courtship as the source of her problems with Cai, she said. Nor does she think cross-cultural relationships are inherently problematic. Rather, she realizes that she tried too hard to be the wife that Cai had told her he wanted, without considering her own personality or preferences.

Now, she says, she and Cai get along well; he lives in Shanghai with his third wife, an opera singer, and Blumberg-Kason has also remarried. Reached by email, Cai was reluctant to discuss the details of their relationship. “There are two sides involved in making a relationship harmonious, there are also two sides involved when a relationship sours,” he wrote.

To the extent she allowed herself to get lost in the relationship, Blumberg-Kason probably agrees. Throughout her marriage, she wrote, she had wondered, “Was it a cultural difference or a personality one?” In the end, she realized, “It didn’t matter. What mattered was me. I couldn’t spend my life orbiting around him like a satellite.”

The issue wasn’t whether or not Blumberg-Kason could become a good Chinese wife—it was gaining confidence in herself to be whatever kind of wife, mother and woman she wanted to be.

Maura Elizabeth Cunningham is a historian and writer based in Shanghai. Follow her on Twitter @mauracunningham.

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